connecting*the*dots

First, there was the machinima net neutrality PSA. Now it’s straight up, raw information:

Check out the tag archive for “net neutrality”.

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(inspired by C&L)

More information at saveaccess.org.

(via David Wienberger)

I’ve got one bullet left in the chamber, so this had better work.

This is a pissed-off customer rant. Proceed with caution.

To make a very long, frustrating story as short as possible, I lost every contact from my Treo 600 added over the past 5 months. There was some kind of a sync corruption that actually busted my phone — turning it off when receiving incoming calls from non-Sprint networks.

The same thing happened last December and the local Sprint store gave me a substitute 600, which worked fine until I tried to sync it this past week.

After it busted on Thursday while I tried to sync up my new contacts from last week’s Beyond Broadcast conference, I spent a good deal of time on Friday, Saturday and today in the local Sprint store, with the culmination of the first two days having me walk out of the store with a “reset” phone.

Today, I skipped the pleasantries. Within minutes I was vociferously arguing that they needed to make me happy or I was going to cut my contract. After 3 hours in the store this afternoon and speaking to what seemed to be the entire corporate ladder to approve a buyout of my contract termination fee, the store manager finally worked out a deal with me to receive a free 650 upgrade.

Fine.

But what a God awful, painful process to get there.

Even though it was obvious to everyone I spoke with that my phone kept busting/erasing data during the Palm sync process, they wanted nothing to do with my sync log sheet. Both their internal tech folk and the folk on the other end of the phone, kept recommending a reset of my phone, which had already been proved to be a useless approach. At one point, the manager started to lean towards it being a network issue or an issue with my computer… something they could do nothing about; you know, “time to go home Mr. Coon and search the web for answers”… Well, that’s when I lost it, diving into a tirade how:

• I’m locked into a two-year contract with Sprint (like the rest of the cellphone customers of the world!)
• They branded my Treo 600, so I can’t use it with another carrier (therefore I’m holding you responsible for *any* problems. Screw hunting down Treo or Palm or Mac tech support!)
• I’m standing in their brick and mortar customer touch point (and you can’t help me!? wtf!)

I couldn’t help it, I got Jersey on their asses. And that must’ve been the language they understood.

So yeah, the long-story short is that I now have a new Treo 650… and a new 2-year contract. Fuckers.

Prepare yourself for my soon-to-be-written email asking for your contact information… again.

/end rant

UPDATE: My new 650 is working like a charm. Next time Sprint folks, just give a seven year-long customer with an unfixable problem a free upgrade. It’s good business.

Technorati tag results for “information architecture” (feed | page)
Why? It’s what I do, so why not filter through everyone’s posts tagged with IA? I mean, who tags their posts with IA other than IA’s?

Technorati tag results for “linguistics” (feed | page)
Why? I had thought about going to grad school for a linguistics degree… and then this web thingy came along for free.

Chris Fahey and I go back 12 years in the new media game:

• While I was designing CD-Rom games at LTI in 1995, Chris was working on a project at The Music Pen, just a few blocks uptown.
• One of the producers at his gig was a guy named Alan Robbins, who just so happened to teach with my father at Kean University.
• Alan and I became tight for a short period of time following my gig at LTI, as my father introduced us and we rapped about teaching — an interest of mine.
• My friend and colleague from LTI, Rebecca Rothstein, left the gig and took up shop at Rare Medium — one of the big bubble agencies from the mid-nineties.
• Chris happened to do the same, leaving The Music Pen for Rare Medium around the same time.
• A few months later, Rebecca referred me to Organic Online, where I took my first job as an information architect, proper.
• Chris and I both ended up up at the same information architect conventions, honing our craft, meeting new people and drinking flailing dotcom money at the free after-parties.
• Soon thereafter, we both became active participants of the SIG-IA list, participating with the IA community to solve data and interface issues.
• Last August, we had a lively discussion of my never-to-be-seen illustration for the Media Matters redesign.

After coming across one of Chris’ most recent posts regarding the government wiretapping and phone call pattern analysis programs (which was laced with some serious, righteous conviction), I left a comment along the lines that it’s our duty as trained information architects to perform a bit of Internal Affairs work — to help illustrate the potential damage these programs could do to our civil liberties.

You know, illustrate, say, the potential that crossed-path analysis has in generating false-positive relationship assumptions… such as the degree to which Chris and I kept close company over the past 12 years.

You see, we never formally met until last July.

If you get a moment, head over to his blog to review some of his recent thoughts on the matter.

This stuff is serious, folks.

10 Things I Hate About Commandments.

Classic.

(via BoingBoing)

I’m sorry, but listening to Howard Coble in a conversation about terrorism and my rights makes me sick to my stomach. The man may represent my district, but he does not represent me. His apparent zeal to throw my rights to the wind is cowardly and his position on the “war” on terror is idiotic.

I would never willingly give up my right to privacy. Too many men and women have worked themselves to the bone to establish these provisions of this republic, let alone the numbers who have given their lives to defend it, for me to simply shrug away my rights as an American. To toss these rights aside, simply because we have been smacked awake to the fact that we live in the same reality as the rest of the world, is both cowardly and criminal… at best.

Where I come from, such positions would be considered as spitting on the graves of the men and women that perished on 9/11. They may have died a premature, horrific death, but they were free Americans, and that makes all the difference in the world.

Or maybe that’s just how I was raised.

Bill Readings introduced me to linguistics back in my undergraduate days at Syracuse University. It was a low-level Critical Theory class, not enough knowledge to rest a proper degree upon, but that wasn’t Bills concern. He just wanted us to listen and think.

Bill had a wonderful way of illustrating his teachings — placing our 19 year-old minds into comfortable arenas where we could casually move towards comprehension, eventually grasping the core concepts of deconstructionalism and linguistics he tossed about with ease.

After choosing Blade Runner as an explicit assignment for visual deconstruction, and his daily, illustrative call-outs of us numskulls to apply a “bit more apperception to your day-to-day existence,” I’d have to say the strongest, most visceral lesson that stuck with me was his conversation around the English word “tree” and the Spanish word “arbol.”

An Attempt To Share Knowledge

To monolingual, English speaking folk first exposed to the authority of the Spanish translation, the inherent belief is that the two terms (English and Spanish) are perfect representations of the signifier, “tree”… which is wrong.

The signifier of “tree” is more akin to your personal mental model of the physical representation of:

original photos by icathing and Melete

Viewed through the lens of semiology and linguistics, we cannot absolutely assert that tree = arbol, because the signifier of “tree” has a unique representative interface to each of us, as does the percept of the translation of “arbol.”

Our individuality is too explicit to absolutely relate to explicit terminology.

Or put into political terms, in this society of modern constructs — one that consistently nudges us towards silos of absolute knowledge, relationships and definition — we are presupposed to assign relative constructs of our world to get by, based on what, in essence, is an aggregate misunderstanding of our own individual cognitive processing.

Back to the tree example; Roland Barthes on Saussure:

Until he found the words signifier and signified, however, sign remained ambiguous, for it tended to become identified with the signifier only, which Saussure wanted at all costs to avoid; after having hesitated between some and seme, form and idea, image and concept, Saussure settled upon signifier and signified, the union of which forms the sign.

Nowadays, whenever I stumble upon a conversation about knowledge and structure — such as Are trees natural? over at David Weinberger’s blog — the information architect within me rests in a state of nirvana, coaxed into releasing control by his neighbor, the experience designer.

Each day we rely on our own trees of knowledge — branches of immeasurable directions and depth, overlapping and crossing one another to form meshed nests of position. The common faith we tend to hold regarding knowledge, is in the strength to overlap our individual trees with one another; the more the overlap, the more the homogenous culture, driving civil movement within this complex ecosystem and jungle we’ve created for ourselves.

Well, some people seem to prescribe to such theories.

In the midst of this information revolution, when we engage in the practice of tagging our information objects, we’re not only engaging in an activity to increase the discovery of our position via the use of common signifiers, we’re implicitly participating in a form of expression — painting our personal mental model of our signified constructs onto the sign itself.

In turn, the degree of shared context an individual holds on the receiving end, determines the degree to which her reception of the sign becomes explicit communication.

Enabled by technology, we can now easily add descriptive tags to the aggregate objects of words, colors, sounds and movement delivered more directly to the branches of each other’s trees. In this flip scenario of retrieval, we now rapidly stumble across these additions, assigning them as variants of welcome or disruptive bits of information.

In any case, our common trees of knowledge are being affected… they are evolving.

To this day, these particular words of Ferdinad de Saussure cannot escape my purview:

In the lives of individuals and of societies, language is a factor of greater importance than any other. For the study of language to remain soley the business of a handful of specialists would be a quite unacceptable state of affairs. In practice, the study of language is of some degree or other the concern of everyone.

photo by heather allison

If Bill hadn’t stepped into the wrong plane at the wrong time in the fall of 1994, he would’ve witnessed rapid advancements of the inner-workings of the web — specifically the participatory meshing of topics, interests, desires and perspectives via individual and social tagging through citizen blogging, vlogging, podcasting, etc.

The post-modern, knowledge craving, subversive side of Bill would be beaming right about now… just about as brightly as the multinational, career for-hire professor.

In the name of knowledge, and a hat-tip to my mentor, I think I’ll be busy late into the evening this October 30th.

Artist: The Coup
Song: Head (Of State)

==========

[Intro/Chorus]
Bush and Hussein together in bed
Giving H-E-A-D head
Y’all motherfuckers heard what we said
Billions made and millions dead

[repeat 8X]
Work it out; set it up

[Chorus] - 2X

[Boots]
In a land not very far away from here
George W. Bush was drinkin beer
His daddy was head of the CIA
Now listen up close to what I say
The CIA worked for Standard Oil
And other companies to whom they’re loyal
In a whole ‘nother land by the name of Iran
The people got wise and took a stand
to the oil companies, ay ain’t shit funny?
This is our oil, our land, our money
CIA got mad and sent false info
to Iraq to help start the Iran/Iraq wo’
Pronounced war if I have to be proper
The CIA is the cops that’s why I hate the coppers
Saddam Hussein was their man out there
They told him to rule while keepin people scared
Sayin any opposition to him, he must crush it
He gassed the Kurds, they gave him his budget
Said you gotta kick ass to protect our cash
Step out of line and feel our wrath
You know the time without lookin at the little hand
Time came for them to cut out the middle man
Children maimed with no legs and shit
Cause the “Bombs Over..” you know the OutKast hit
And they really want you to hate him dead
When just the other day they made him head
War ain’t about one land against the next
It’s po’ people dyin so the rich cash checks

[Chorus] - 2X

[repeat 16X]
Work it out; set it up

The single, It Don’t Feel Right — from their latest album, Game Theory — is out on the web. Look for the album to drop soon.

If you never listen to hip-hop, this is the band to check out.

Photos from spcoon’s contacts (feed | page)

Why? I find pictures just as interesting as words (actually, 1000x interesting). Sign up on flickr to get your own feed of friend’s pictures.

(This is the first post of an endless stream of posts that will document my RSS additions and subtractions moving forward — I’m already 101 deep. If you’re a regular reader of mine, you’ll get to see my interests evolve over time. If you’ve landed here from Google, well, maybe you’ll glean some ideas for using RSS in the information age.)

photo by Daveybot

Not only do I need to get my home in order (uhm, yeah, it’s now “lived in”), I need to prioritize my project work so I can get a few out the door (making myself and my partners in crime less stressed), get organized on the remaining work and figure out my capacity for taking on new projects. Why am I making this public knowledge? Because it counts as today’s blog post, of course. ;-)

Okay, so here goes nothing:

Today

• Knock out my Grandmother’s book cover design. - She going on 102 years-old, ’nuff said.
• File for LLC status of dot matrix - I have to get out of freelance transition mode.
• Submit the paperwork for non-profit status of The People, Yes - I finally have a small board of directors and officers, I just need to alert my lawyer
• Continue finishing the research deliverables for TheStreet.com - Design personas, context scenarios and then putting together the overall proposal
• Write up an identity abstract for dot matrix - The team (top secret ;) needs to respond and help shape the vision
• Write an RSS 101 post - As promised last week to the wonderful folk at Kindermusik
• Get Nick Reville the half submitted bounties - I had to give up my volunteer gig managing BountyCounty, but I’ve been behind transferring the remaining emails. Can you see why?

There’s so much more, but I’ve_got_to_focus…

Citizen media is an authentic media.

The amateur (Etymology: French, from Latin amator lover, from amare to love) doesn’t create out of a responsibility to a deadline or a paycheck; the amateur creates out of a love for the process, the output, the feedback, the very notion of creativity itself. And in this new world of interconnectivity, the availibility of our tangibly crafted desires and dreams has increased exponentially.

We are connected.

photo by Mexicanwave

And entrepreneurs are taking notice.

We’re quickly moving towards a period where a good chunk of the web will be explicitly designed (or re-designed) to take advantage of such authentic creativity. The old 1.0 slogan “Content is king” didn’t die off — it simply redefined itself through the lens of the passionate, authentic amateur.

YouTube and flickr have captured the very essence of what makes video and photography communities, respectively, thrive.

• Instantaneous feedback and discourse
• The ability to shelve favorites
• Discovery of new objects based on meshed interests with other community members
• Being able to add friends and join/start groups to extend the conversation

Between the commitment to upload massive amounts of media and the amount of time and effort one invests participating in these communities, the “throwaway” gap that previously existed for most web services (think about web analytic services or even a blogging platform) has practically disappeared. These particular domains aren’t ripe for member disengagement anymore based on a single bad experience, as they’ve progressed to becoming a part of our psyche, partially defining us through the connections our authentic media creates with others and vice-versa.

Though, as much as I believe in the potential of interconnected authentic media to inform, inspire, entertain and generate new communities, I equally believe that our media should not be leveraged from afar to pay someone else’s bills without explicit financial returns from the ecosystem. So if this perspective became a reality, would it cause authentic media to cease being authentic? Is this perspective just an excuse for a low entry point into the mainstream media ecosystem? I don’t think so.

From Kevin Kelly and The New York Times, Scan This Book:

[…]

We see this effect most clearly in science. Science is on a long-term campaign to bring all knowledge in the world into one vast, interconnected, footnoted, peer-reviewed web of facts. Independent facts, even those that make sense in their own world, are of little value to science. (The pseudo- and parasciences are nothing less, in fact, than small pools of knowledge that are not connected to the large network of science.) In this way, every new observation or bit of data brought into the web of science enhances the value of all other data points. In science, there is a natural duty to make what is known searchable. No one argues that scientists should be paid when someone finds or duplicates their results. Instead, we have devised other ways to compensate them for their vital work. They are rewarded for the degree that their work is cited, shared, linked and connected in their publications, which they do not own. They are financed with extremely short-term (20-year) patent monopolies for their ideas, short enough to truly inspire them to invent more, sooner. To a large degree, they make their living by giving away copies of their intellectual property in one fashion or another.

[…]

Scientists “are rewarded for the degree that their work is cited, shared, linked and connected in their publications, which they do not own.” If we were to view authentic media creations as nodes of input, for which entrepreneurs can generate beyond-hyperlink synapses of interconnectivity, the difference between the goals of science and the intrinsic behavior of the web would be rather slim.

This is where the conversation shifts to the concerns of the elite to the desire of the commons.

What side of the aisle do you sit?

UPDATE: Can we do this together?

complexity simplified
down to a complicated flow
while the divide grows more real
i congeal and heal slow
feel out the stitched up steel
while i revel in the real
living to merge
the floor with the ceil-ing
the door with the squeal-ing
hinges
the future of our collective knowledge of self
intellectual wealth
nourishing stealth
cost of entry is just about gone
for the taxpaying throng
so it’s time to find the other
mothers
fathers
sisters
brothers
long-lost souls
if i had my druthers
we’d frame the scene
tape the green
capture the in-between
rhyme writing poly-rhythmatic pointing machine
neutrons circling like natives to the wagon
iterating faster than the anti-matter
machine
reverse feeding
on the atoms
on the really simple syndicates
the aggregate crowd
jumping up and down
squaring a level five as exceptionally loud
and clear
step to the rear…

  or    

Doc Searls, co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto and lifelong technology visionary or Mike McCurry, a life-long communication, PR and government professional?

Follow the image links and think for yourself.

(inspired by Matt Stoller)